more slow internet

I was checking the speed using the TWC speed test. I noticed that using an
XP computer that an old version of MS internet explorer gave a lot better
speed on the down load than Google Chrome did. Chrome did have a slight
advantage on the upload.
Explorer would give 40 to 42 mb while Chrome was at 26. An hour later it
was explorer 26 and chrome at 17. Both times it was explorer slightly less
than 5 for the upload and chrome slightly over 5 for the upload.
Interisting that an old version of explorer would be that much faster than
chrome. Looking at Youtube it seems that it takes a long time to load and
play under chrome but almost instant on explorer.

Browsers are among the most bloated pieces of software on the planet.
You might want to try a more "manual" test:
- find something "big", somewhere (e.g., a movie)
- download via browser of choice and see what browser reports for speed
- try the same using wget (which avoids the browser entirely and shows you
what your connection+network stack are capable of)

I've heard that you should only perform speed tests with wired
(ethernet) connections, not wifi for accurate readings.
You may also have to take all but the device you are using for testing
offline for the test duration.
Some people claim that monitoring the speed of a FTP file transfer is
more accurate than the typical web browser based speed test.
This speed test site is a bit more detailed than the popular web based
options:
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Agree.
I have Centurylink DSL and not one of their high speed accts. Ona good day,
I can see a true 1.6MB/sec, d/l. This using wget and an FTP server:
<http://wget.addictivecode.org/FrequentlyAskedQuestions?action=show&redirect ϊq#download>
.....wget is an FTP retrieval client and I test my d/l speed by
grabbing offa Univ of Utah FTP server. Try this file:
<ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/slackware/slackware-iso/slackware64-14.1-iso/slackware64-14.1-install-dvd.iso
If you use wget, it will indicate the d/l speed. This real bandwidth
speed, not jes a fancy representation of some alleged metered speed on
some bogus testing site. A CL field tech once told me those speed test
websites are all bogus. If you get wget installed, you would use this
command:

The "filename" being that entire ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/ file,
provided above.
nb

I guess that depends on what you are trying to determine.
When the TWC tech was at my house to try and solve some speed/performance
issues, we ran speed tests on my iPad, my smartphone and his smartphone with
the existing single band router. He then replaced it with a dual band router
and we ran the speed tests again, with much improvement.
Since my wired PC was not having any issues, the speed tests over WiFi
proved that there was an issue with the original router.

Perhaps, if you are trying to determine individual performance of a specific
device under pristine conditions. However, if you are testing relative
performance under normal operating conditions, the testing environment
should resemble the norm, not the exception.
My TWC issue was that I was satisfied with the speed/performance of our
home network when it was SWMBO and I using just 2 devices at any given
time. However, when the girls were home from college and added their
laptops and smartphones to the environment, our network slowed to
crawl. The replacement of the router with a dual band appears to have
solved those issues.
Individual speed tests on standalone, wired devices probably wouldn't have
shown us anything.

It would have shown you the problem was with the WiFi not the network. I
always run both wired and wireless speed tests to see where the bottleneck
is and it's almost always in the Wifi, not the ISP - but there are
exceptions.

On Wednesday, April 13, 2016 at 11:26:58 PM UTC-4, Robert Green wrote:

You snipped all the relevant portions of the post. We knew the wired worked just fine, even with the old router. The problem was obviously outside the wired portion of the network. By running
WiFi speed tests before and after the router was replaced, we knew immediately that the router
was the problem and not one of the WiFi devices itself hogging the network.
Knowing that the problem was WiFi related doesn't narrow it down to the root cause.

My internet connection is 50Mbps down. That's what I get on a wired
connection.
When I tried it on my first 802.11n connection (shown as 72.2M), I would
get just about 38M download. Getting the wide channel connection (150M)
fixed that, and I get the 50M I'm supposed to with either wired or WiFi.

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